Human beings have been successfully flying powered aircraft for slightly more than one hundred years. During that time, there have been radical improvements in all areas of the field of aviation. However, despite ongoing herculean efforts to improve the safety and reliability of air-travel, incidents and accidents continue to occur. Given the sheer complexity of the aircraft, airports, flight control, piloting methods, meteorology, and other factors that can seriously impact safety, there continue to be many potential causes for accidents and incidents (hereinafter, collectively “accidents”).
One of the major causes of aircraft accidents across the world are wind conditions occurring in proximity to a runway as a pilot attempts to land or take-off using that runway. Ideally, calm air conditions or a constant headwind (i.e., a wind blowing towards an airplane out of the direction of travel of the airplane) would be present whenever a plane lands or takes-off from a runway. This is because as wind flows over an aircraft's wings, lift is generated. If the airflow is not directly opposite the direction the aircraft is moving, then lift is reduced. In order to maintain proper flight control, a pilot therefore needs to be aware of the wind conditions along a runway. In response to this need, there are a number of current information systems being used in the art to monitor and report basic wind conditions near airports. Although somewhat minimal in nature, this basic wind information is still quite helpful for pilots attempting to take-off or land their planes. Nevertheless, if wind conditions are rapidly changing, gusting, or varying along different points of a given runway (or along different runways), a pilot can find the basic wind information inadequate at best and woefully misleading and extremely dangerous at worst.
For example, as the airflow of wind over a wing rapidly changes speed or direction, there is a correspondingly rapid change in the lift being generated by the wing. A pilot must then quickly compensate for these changes or risk an accident. If a pilot is informed that the winds at an airport are ten knots (kt) out of the west, he or she may be very surprised to find that at one end of the runway winds are gusting at twenty knots out of the southwest, at ten knots per hour out of the west in the middle of the runway, and fifteen knots per hour from the northwest at the other end of the runway. The sheer size of today's airports can further exacerbate this problem. If a pilot is told that winds are out of the west at twenty knots at Denver International Airport (DIA), for example, he or she must wonder how much the wind information varies along the many runways spread across the fifty three square miles that make up DIA. Thus, current minimal wind conditions information systems are insufficient to properly inform a pilot in order that he or she can maintain control over their aircraft and land or take-off safely.
To further complicate matters, wind information can often change not only from point to point along a runway, but also can quickly change in time as well. For example, the winds can be a generally constant ten knots from the east at one time and then switch to gusting ten to twenty knots from the west minutes later. As current minimal wind indicator systems are often slow to update and rarely provide up to the minute information, additional problems can develop for a pilot relying on such untimely, out-of-date information. In fact, current automated weather detection sites such as Surface Weather Observation Stations (ASOS) or Automated Weather Observation Stations (AWOS) can provide as little as a single reading within an hour and may be located miles from a given runway.
What is needed is a real-time runway digital wind indicator system that can sense and report wind information from multiple locations along a runway as well as from the centerfield location (near a center point for a given airport) in a constantly updating, real-time manner without burying pilots with too much information.